Polycentricity

= "polycentricity (is) defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules". [1]

History

.. of the concept, by By Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko:

Michael Polanyi

"The concept of polycentricity (tentatively defined as a social system of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules) was first envisaged by Michael Polanyi (1951) in his book The Logic of Liberty.

From there it diffused to law studies, thanks to Lon Fuller (1978) and others (Chayes1976; Horowitz 1977), to urban networks studies (Davoudi 2002; Hague and Kirk 2003), and, even more importantly, to governance studies, thanks to Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of institutional analysis (Aligica and Boettke 2009).

The 2009 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Elinor Ostrom pushed this concept to renewed attention. Indeed, the notion of polycentricity has a pivotal role in the Bloomington School of institutional analysis. Yet, although the concept is often recognized as important, not much has been done to further clarify and elaborate it, beyond the work of the aforementioned authors. This article is an attempt to deal with this challenge.

Initial Developments: Michael Polanyi’s original development of the concept of polycentricity was the outcome of his interest in the social conditions preserving the freedom of expression and the rule of law (Prosch 1986, 178). His approach was highly original in that he based his social analysis on an analogy to the organization of the scientific community. This was facilitated by his anti-positivist approach to the philosophy of science, as he considered the success of science to be the outcome of a certain kind of social organization, rather than of scientists following a rigidly defined “scientific method” (Polanyi 1951). Polanyi argued that the success of science was mainly due to its “polycentric organization.”

In such organizational systems, participants enjoy the freedom to make individual and personal contributions, and to structure their research activities in the best way they considered fit. Researchers’ efforts do not usually dissipate in unproductive directions because they share a common ideal; that is, their freedom is utilized to search for an abstract end goal (objective truth). Polanyi’s key point is that such an abstract and under-operationalized ideal cannot be imposed on the participants by an overarching authority. Thus, the authority structure has to allow a multitude of opinions to exist, and to allow them not just as hypotheticals but as ideas actually implemented into practice. The attempt to impose progress toward an abstract ideal is doomed to failure, as progress is the outcome of a trial-and-error evolutionary process of many agents interacting freely. Polanyi argued that the same applies to art, religion, or the law as it applies to science because these other activities are also polycentric in nature and are driven by certain ideals (beauty, transcendent truth, and justice). Polanyi did not stop at these observations. He used the concept of polycentricity as a particularly well-suited tool for addressing the well-known socialist calculation problem (Lange 1938; Mises 1922). His arguments about the impossibility of economic calculation in a socialist system were closely related to Hayek’s, yet they also benefited from the more general perspective provided by the concept of polycentricity. The market, he wrote, should be seen as a polycentric system involving a web of many agents that constantly adjust their behavior to the decisions made by others. Socialism implies the transformation of the system into a mono-centric one. To make his point, Polanyi drives an analogy between scientists trying to discover the truth and entrepreneurs trying to discover the best way to make profit. In some sense, the market can also be said to have an ideal, namely, to deliver the optimal distribution of goods and the optimal production processes (i.e., to reach a Pareto equilibrium), and real markets always fall short of this ideal as agents lack perfect information and human activities often involve externalities. The socialist system is an attempt to reach at (Pareto) economic optimum states faster and better than the market by means of a command-and-control strategy that is supposed to reduce the misallocation of resources, something supposedly inherent and unavoidable in a polycentric market system. In other words, centralized socialism was expected towork better than the free market and to deliver faster economic growth.

However, the Pareto equilibrium ideal is not exactly easy to operational-argument is obviously related to Hayek’s, but Polanyi parted ways with Hayek in regard to one important aspect, namely, the issue of social justice. The difference is important for our current understanding of polycentricism. While Hayek (1973) argued that the concept of social justice is literally meaningless, Polanyi was concerned that the market system comes into conflict with certain religious or secular moral values and that it may actually generate incentives undermining moral behavior (Polanyi and Prosch 1975). This way of reframing the issue of market-and-morality by reference to individual behavior avoids the types of collectivist arguments that Hayek tried to debunk, while keeping the issue of morality on the table.

Nonetheless, Polanyi’s epistemic brand of moral relativism also meant that he believed that any attempt to impose morality by a central authority was not likely to succeed. Moreover, as a side effect of centralized enforcement, such attempts would only diminish freedom. In this regard, Polanyi argued that socialism was in fact not so much an economic theory but amoral system, and the claims to scientific status were merely a rhetorical device meant to facilitate the spread of the system. As such, to the eco-nomic critique of socialism, Polanyi added the argument of moral relativism, that is, the idea that justice itself is an ideal one can only hope to approach by means of a gradual trial-and-error process. This idea and Polanyi’s concept of polycentricity, in general, proved to be a source of inspiration in legal studies.

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256034941_Polycentricity_From_Polanyi_to_Ostrom_and_Beyond)

More information

* Article: Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond. By Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko. Governance 25(2), April 2012 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2011.01550.x)

URL = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256034941_Polycentricity_From_Polanyi_to_Ostrom_and_Beyond

"The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non-ad hoc analogies between different types of self-organizing complex social systems."